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Jennifer Egan Tweets New Short Story

Detractors of Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad often mention “the PowerPoint chapter”—a 75-page slideshow in which a teenage character narrates scenes from her family life. Fans, though, might point to this chapter as evidence of Egan’s willingness to break free of old strictures, and of her facility with storytelling in new media.

“Black Box,” which will also be published in the magazine and features a character from Good Squad, is being tweeted in installments, one per minute for an hour, starting nightly at 8 p.m., the Local Fort Greene reports. The tweeting began on Thursday, and continues through Saturday.

Egan told the [The New Yorker] that she wrote the story, “Black Box,” specifically for Twitter to be followed by readers on laptops, smartphones and other electronic devices. “This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one—because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a 140 characters,” Egan said.